Meet the Asshole Who Started the Starbucks Cup Controversy!

EVERYBODY CALM DOWN. Here are the facts: Starbucks have red cups for Christmas. They don’t say anything about Christmas on them. They never have. A Christian guy named Josh Feuerstein tried to stir up anger about it. Everybody else got angry at the anger. Starbucks raked in millions of dollars in free publicity.

That’s just the way shit goes these days: a small group of people get angry about something, justifiably or not, and their anger gets amplified whether you personally feel it deserves to or not. Sometimes that’s a good thing, in my opinion, like with #BlackLivesMatters. People have their voices heard where a decade ago they never would have, thanks in large part to social media.

And sometimes it’s a bad thing, like in the case of Feuerstein. A writer at Daily Kos outright called him a con man. I won’t call him a con man because I don’t feel like going to court, but I will point out some of the interesting points that Daily Kos brought up: he sent his followers to attack a random bakery that didn’t want to make him an anti-gay cake, he asked his followers for $20,000 to buy a camera that he later admitted he never bought, and he lives in an expensive house and owns a lot of expensive watches and shoes that he shows off on social media.

Seriously, I don’t know if that qualifies him as a “con man,” because in my mind that’s just what people who run religions and churches do! It’s like being angry at a bird for shitting on your car.

That said, Feuerstein apparently doesn’t even run a church. He’s just another religious bigot on social media.

He apparently does have some kind of standards, though, since some folks noticed he uploaded and then deleted a video where he says Starbucks’ coffee is bitter because of abortion. First of all, Starbucks’ coffee is bitter because they burn their beans. Everyone knows that.

Second of all, whether or not you like their burnt ass coffee, and whether or not you like the fact that they donate money to Planned Parenthood, you should at the very least appreciate that they’re consistently one of the best companies to work for in the US, thanks to providing excellent benefits, high pay, and, as they announced on Veteran’s Day, 100% tuition-free four-year college to the spouse or child of every U.S. veteran or active military reservist employed 20 or more hours a week. They also plan to hire 10,000 veterans by 2018 and by 2016 have 30 stores run by veterans and their spouses to help veterans transition into the civilian world.

And conservative Christians have to love that, right? Surely they wouldn’t turn their backs on the men and women serving in our military? I mean, what would Jesus do? Probably complain about what’s on the cups at Starbucks. Yep.

Rebecca Watson

Rebecca leads a team of skeptical female activists at Skepchick.org. She travels around the world delivering entertaining talks on science, atheism, feminism, and skepticism. There is currently an asteroid orbiting the sun with her name on it. You can follow her every fascinating move on Twitter or on Google+.

My answer might be to write “You are cordially invited to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of Jesus, son of Joseph.” in Aramaic on the cup. If they can’t read Aramaic, that’s merely a sign they are insufficiently Christian.

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The Skepchick Network is a collection of smart and often sarcastic blogs focused on science and critical thinking. The original site is Skepchick.org, founded by Rebecca Watson in 2005 to discuss women’s issues from a skeptical standpoint.